Fur, Feather, Fetish and Fuzziness

 I can’t really do better than Mark Valencia on Bachtrack . . .at least for the moment, while I'm dealing with some other issues.

Except for a technical note. |I watched the Aix en Provence Alcina off the Opera Platform on a widescreen telly connected to my Mac. The video was produced by Arte; and it was awful. It was frequently fuzzy, sometimes stuttered, the frame rate was too low and the soundtrack a few milliseonds out of sync. All the hallmarks, in fact, of an amateur and quick transfer to an MP4 video.

Now, my own speciality is audio, not video, but even I can do better than make an MP4 that looks like a poorly copied VHS video. And, surely, Arte can too? Especially when the original must have been broadcast quality.

The production is clever and absorbing, the orchestra brilliant. But the video . . .I had to give myself an extra interval during the acts to rest my eyes.

I’m pretty enthused about The Opera Platform, but poor quality video, especially for a production of this complexity, is a bad advert for it.

All the same, well worth catching. (See update below!) Even more worthwhile it you can read the subtitles: in French on The Opera Platform, or in German on Arte.de. Come to think of it, if The Opera Platform is really to be as 'European' as it apparently intends, wouldn't a choice of subtitle languages be useful?

Update:

In response. Luke O'Shaughnessy, Project Manager at The Opera Platform wrote to us:

"The version that is currently online is a plain recording of the live streaming and will shortly be replaced by a remastered version that is currently in preparation. I hope the quality of the next version, that will be subtitled in six languages also, will be of a better quality."

At last! I was beginning to wonder if a 'European' Opera Platform could truly be so if most of its online offerings were only subtitled in either German or French. 

It's probably easier for people who are truly bi- or tri-lingual, but I just watched the Rotterdam production of Terry Gilliam's Benvenuto Cellini. (Also Arte, and decent quality!) It's peculiarly distracting to hear an opera sung in French (or Italian) but to also be mentally translating German subtitles at the same time if you happen neither to be French or German. (That, though, was partly my own fault: I found there was a version without subtitles afterwards.)